Veolia Water STI Offers Unparalleled Water Quality Monitoring

Challenge

Ultrapure water is the principal reagent for laboratory analyses. The availability of information in laboratories or hospitals is essential as the quality of the water produced guarantees the reliability of clinical diagnoses. Until now, information was accessible to the laboratories via an internal logbook, which did not allow for reliable forecasting and required them to have large stocks of consumables to avoid breaks in production. Moreover, the ISO 15189 standard required complete traceability of information, and Veolia Water STI needed to find a solution.

Solution

To deal with these challenges, Veolia Water STI turned to Sierra Wireless in order to help provide its customers with an effective solution for monitoring their ultrapure water production equipment. In addition to providing the Sierra Wireless FXT009 programmable modem, the Sierra Wireless professional services team also developed STI Vision, a platform specifically for Veolia Water STI based on the APIs of the AirVantage® Enterprise Platform solution.

The FXT009 programmable modem offers quad-band EDGE connectivity in a rugged form suitable for inclusion in an M2M solution. It allows for integration in a wide range of industrial equipment as an alternative to a full module integration, eliminating the need for full regulatory and network operator certification.

STI Vision is a secure web application with a customisable interface allowing laboratories to supervise all of their water purifiers. The production of ultrapure water is monitored in real-time and available through the web application. This information can also be seen on a dedicated control panel and is shared on a web calendar that shows past and scheduled activities to simplify the forecasting of both supply ordering and system maintenance.

“The integration of the Sierra Wireless Airlink modem and AirVantage M2M Cloud allows us to offer our customers unparalleled monitoring and to be proactive with respect to their needs, thus enabling them to concentrate on their core business,” said Franck Wolf, technical manager of the ELGA product line for Veolia Water STI. “This guarantees them better visibility of the water purification systems in their laboratory, greater autonomy of the internal technicians and significantly reduced service times.”

For its part, Veolia Water STI can now remotely provide maintenance operations and determine the level of reagents in real time, reducing the stock of laboratory consumables and providing much greater service to its customers.